_May, 1897._
Finality, the close of a life, of a relationship, of an era, even
though this be a purely artificial creation of human arrangement, in
all cases appeals powerfully to the imagination, and especially to
that of a generation self-conscious as ours, a generation which has
coined for itself the phrase _fin de siècle_ to express its belief,
however superficial and mistaken, that it knows its own exponents and
its own tendencies; that, amid the din of its own progress sounding in
its ears, it knows not only whence it comes but whither it goes. The
nineteenth century is about to die, only to rise again in the
twentieth. Whence did it come? How far has it gone? Whither is it
going?
A full reply to such queries would presume an abridged universal
history of the expiring century such as a magazine article, or series
of articles, could not contemplate for a moment. The scope proposed to
himself by the present writer, itself almost unmanageable within the
necessary limits, looks not to the internal conditions of states, to
those economical and social tendencies which occupy so large a part of
contemporary attention, seeming to many the sole subjects that deserve
attention, and that from the most purely material and fleshly point of
view. Important as these things are, it may be affirmed at least that
they are not everything; and that, great as has been the material
progress of the century, the changes in international relations and
relative importance, not merely in states of the European family, but
among the peoples of the world at large, have been no less striking.
It is from this direction that the writer wishes to approach his
subject, which, if applied to any particular country, might be said to
be that of its external relations; but which, in the broader view that
it will be sought to attain, regards rather the general future of the
world as indicated by movements already begun and in progress, as well
as by tendencies now dimly discernible, which, if not counteracted,
are pregnant of further momentous shifting of the political balances,
profoundly affecting the welfare of mankind.
It appears a convenient, though doubtless very rough, way of prefacing
this subject to say that the huge colonizing movements of the
eighteenth century were brought to a pause by the American Revolution,
which deprived Great Britain of her richest colonies, succeeded, as
that almost immediately was, by the French Revolution and the
devastating wars of the republic and of Napoleon, which forced the
attention of Europe to withdraw from external allurements and to
concentrate upon its own internal affairs. The purchase of Louisiana
by the United States at the opening of the current century emphasized
this conclusion; for it practically eliminated the continent of North
America from the catalogue of wild territories available for foreign
settlement. Within a decade this was succeeded by the revolt of the
Spanish colonies, followed later by the pronouncements of President
Monroe and of Mr. Canning, which assured their independence by
preventing European interference. The firmness with which the position
of the former statesman has been maintained ever since by the great
body of the people of the United States, and the developments his
doctrine afterwards received, have removed the Spanish-American
countries equally from all probable chance of further European
colonization, in the political sense of the word.
Thus the century opened. Men's energies still sought scope beyond the
sea, doubtless; not, however, in the main, for the founding of new
colonies, but for utilizing ground already in political occupation.
Even this, however, was subsidiary. The great work of the nineteenth
century, from nearly its beginning to nearly its close, has been in
the recognition and study of the forces of nature, and the application
of them to the purposes of mechanical and economical advance. The
means thus placed in men's hands, so startling when first invented, so
familiar for the most part to us now, were devoted necessarily, first,
to the development of the resources of each country. Everywhere there
was a fresh field; for hitherto it had been nowhere possible to man
fully to utilize the gifts of nature. Energies everywhere turned
inward, for there, in every region, was more than enough to do.
Naturally, therefore, such a period has been in the main one of peace.
There have been great wars, certainly; but, nevertheless, external
peace has been the general characteristic of that period of
development, during which men have been occupied in revolutionizing
the face of their own countries by means of the new powers at their
disposal.
All such phases pass, however, as does every human thing. Increase of
production--the idol of the economist--sought fresh markets, as might
have been predicted. The increase of home consumption, through
increased ease of living, increased wealth, increased population, did
not keep up with the increase of forth-putting and the facility of
distribution afforded by steam. In the middle of the century China and
Japan were forced out of the seclusion of ages, and were compelled,
for commercial purposes at least, to enter into relations with the
European communities, to buy and to sell with them. Serious attempts,
on any extensive scale, to acquire new political possessions abroad
largely ceased. Commerce only sought new footholds, sure that, given
the inch, she in the end would have the ell. Moreover, the growth of
the United States in population and resources, and the development of
the British Australian colonies, contributed to meet the demand, of
which the opening of China and Japan was only a single indication.
That opening, therefore, was rather an incident of the general
industrial development which followed upon the improvement of
mechanical processes and the multiplication of communications.
Thus the century passed its meridian, and began to decline towards its
close. There were wars and there were rumors of wars in the countries
of European civilization. Dynasties rose and fell, and nations shifted
their places in the scale of political importance, as old-time boys in
school went up and down; but, withal, the main characteristic abode,
and has become more and more the dominant prepossession of the
statesmen who reached their prime at or soon after the times when the
century itself culminated. The maintenance of a _status quo_, for
purely utilitarian reasons of an economical character, has gradually
become an ideal--the _quieta non movere_ of Sir Robert Walpole. The
ideal is respectable, certainly; in view of the concert of the powers,
in the interest of their own repose, to coerce Greece and the Cretans,
we may perhaps refrain from calling it noble. The question remains,
how long can it continue respectable in the sense of being practicable
of realization,--a rational possibility, not an idle dream? Many are
now found to say--and among them some of the most bitter of the
advocates of universal peace, who are among the bitterest of modern
disputants--that when the Czar Nicholas proposed to move the quiet
things, half a century ago, and to reconstruct the political map of
southeastern Europe in the interest of well-founded quiet, it was he
that showed the idealism of rational statesmanship,--the only truly
practical statesmanship,--while the defenders of the _status quo_
evinced the crude instincts of the mere time-serving politician. That
the latter did not insure quiet, even the quiet of desolation, in
those unhappy regions, we have yearly evidence. How far is it now a
practicable object, among the nations of the European family, to
continue indefinitely the present realization of peace and plenty,--in
themselves good things, but which are advocated largely on the ground
that man lives by bread alone,--in view of the changed conditions of
the world which the departing nineteenth century leaves with us as its
bequest? Is the outlook such that our present civilization, with its
benefits, is most likely to be insured by universal disarmament, the
clamor for which rises ominously--the word is used advisedly--among
our latter-day cries? None shares more heartily than the writer the
aspiration for the day when nations shall beat their swords into
ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; but is European
civilization, including America, so situated that it can afford to
relax into an artificial peace, resting not upon the working of
national consciences, as questions arise, but upon a Permanent
Tribunal,--an external, if self-imposed authority,--the realization in
modern policy of the ideal of the mediæval Papacy?
The outlook--the signs of the times, what are they? It is not given to
human vision, peering into the future, to see more than as through a
glass, darkly; men as trees walking, one cannot say certainly whither.
Yet signs may be noted even if they cannot be fully or precisely
interpreted; and among them I should certainly say is to be observed
the general outward impulse of all the civilized nations of the first
order of greatness--except our own. Bound and swathed in the
traditions of our own eighteenth century, when we were as truly
external to the European world as we are now a part of it, we, under
the specious plea of peace and plenty--fulness of bread--hug an ideal
of isolation, and refuse to recognize the solidarity of interest with
which the world of European civilization must not only look forward
to, but go out to meet, the future that, whether near or remote, seems
to await it. I say _we_ do so; I should more surely express my thought
by saying that the outward impulse already is in the majority of the
nation, as shown when particular occasions arouse their attention, but
that it is as yet retarded, and may be retarded perilously long, by
those whose views of national policy are governed by maxims framed in
the infancy of the Republic.
This outward impulse of the European nations, resumed on a large scale
after nearly a century of intermission, is not a mere sudden
appearance, sporadic, and unrelated to the past. The signs of its
coming, though unnoted, were visible soon after the century reached
its half-way stage, as was also its great correlative, equally
unappreciated then, though obvious enough now, the stirring of the
nations of Oriental civilization. It is a curious reminiscence of my
own that when in Yokohama, Japan, in 1868, I was asked to translate a
Spanish letter from Honolulu, relative to a ship-load of Japanese
coolies to be imported into Hawaii. I knew the person engaged to go as
physician to the ship, and, unless my memory greatly deceives me, he
sailed in this employment while I was still in the port. Similarly,
when my service on the station was ended, I went from Yokohama to
Hong-kong, prior to returning home by way of Suez. Among my
fellow-passengers was an ex-Confederate naval officer, whose business
was to negotiate for an immigration of Chinese into, I think, the
Southern States--in momentary despair, perhaps, of black labor--but
certainly into the United States. We all know what has come in our own
country of undertakings which then had attracted little attention.
It is odd to watch the unconscious, resistless movements of nations,
and at the same time read the crushing characterization by our
teachers of the press of those who, by personal characteristics or by
accident, happen to be thrust into the position of leaders, when at
the most they only guide to the least harm forces which can no more be
resisted permanently than can gravitation. Such would have been the
rôle of Nicholas, guiding to a timely end the irresistible course of
events in the Balkans, which his opponents sought to withstand, but
succeeded only in prolonging and aggravating. He is honored now by
those who see folly in the imperial aspirations of Mr. Joseph
Chamberlain, and piracy in Mr. Cecil Rhodes; yet, after all, in his
day, what right had he, by the code of strict constructionists of
national legal rights, to put Turkey to death because she was sick?
Was not Turkey in occupation? Had she not, by strict law, a right to
her possessions, and to live; yea, and to administer what she
considered justice to those who were legally her subjects? But men are
too apt to forget that law is the servant of equity, and that while
the world is in its present stage of development equity which cannot
be had by law must be had by force, upon which ultimately law rests,
not for its sanction, but for its efficacy.
We have been familiar latterly with the term "buffer states;" the
pleasant function discharged by Siam between Great Britain and France.
Though not strictly analogous, the term conveys an idea of the
relations that have hitherto obtained between Eastern and Western
civilizations. They have existed apart, each a world of itself; but
they are approaching not only in geographical propinquity, a
recognized source of danger, but, what is more important, in common
ideas of material advantage, without a corresponding sympathy in
spiritual ideas. It is not merely that the two are in different stages
of development from a common source, as are Russia and Great Britain.
They are running as yet on wholly different lines, springing from
conceptions radically different. To bring them into correspondence in
that, the most important realm of ideas, there is needed on the one
side--or on the other--not growth, but conversion. However far it has
wandered, and however short of its pattern it has come, the
civilization of modern Europe grew up under the shadow of the Cross,
and what is best in it still breathes the spirit of the Crucified. It
is to be feared that Eastern thinkers consider it rather an advantage
than a detriment that they are appropriating the material progress of
Europe unfettered by Christian traditions,--as agnostic countries.
But, for the present at least, agnosticism with Christian ages behind
it is a very different thing from agnosticism which has never known
Christianity.
What will be in the future the dominant spiritual ideas of those
nations which hitherto have been known as Christian, is scarcely a
question of the twentieth century. Whatever variations of faith, in
direction or in degree, the close of that century may show, it is not
probable that so short a period will reveal the full change of
standards and of practice which necessarily must follow ultimately
upon a radical change of belief. That the impress of Christianity will
remain throughout the coming century is reasonably as certain as that
it took centuries of nominal faith to lift Christian standards and
practice even to the point they now have reached. Decline, as well as
rise, must be gradual; and gradual likewise, granting the utmost
possible spread of Christian beliefs among them, will be the
approximation of the Eastern nations, as nations, to the principles
which powerfully modify, though they cannot control wholly even now,
the merely natural impulses of Western peoples. And if, as many now
say, faith has departed from among ourselves, and still more will
depart in the coming years; if we have no higher sanction to propose
for self-restraint and righteousness than enlightened self-interest
and the absurdity of war, war--violence--will be absurd just so long
as the balance of interest is on that side, and no longer. Those who
want will take, if they can, not merely from motives of high policy
and as legal opportunity offers, but for the simple reasons that they
have not, that they desire, and that they are able. The European world
has known that stage already; it has escaped from it only partially by
the gradual hallowing of public opinion and its growing weight in the
political scale. The Eastern world knows not the same motives, but it
is rapidly appreciating the material advantages and the political
traditions which have united to confer power upon the West; and with
the appreciation desire has arisen.
Coincident with the long pause which the French Revolution imposed
upon the process of external colonial expansion which was so marked a
feature of the eighteenth century, there occurred another singular
manifestation of national energies, in the creation of the great
standing armies of modern days, themselves the outcome of the _levée
en masse_, and of the general conscription, which the Revolution
bequeathed to us along with its expositions of the Rights of Man.
Beginning with the birth of the century, perfected during its
continuance, its close finds them in full maturity and power, with a
development in numbers, in reserve force, in organization, and in
material for war, over which the economist perpetually wails, whose
existence he denounces, and whose abolition he demands. As freedom has
grown and strengthened, so have they grown and strengthened. Is this
singular product of a century whose gains for political liberty are
undeniable, a mere gross perversion of human activities, as is so
confidently claimed on many sides? or is there possibly in it also a
sign of the times to come, to be studied in connection with other
signs, some of which we have noted?
What has been the effect of these great armies? Manifold, doubtless.
On the economical side there is the diminution of production, the tax
upon men's time and lives, the disadvantages or evils so dinned daily
into our ears that there is no need of repeating them here. But is
there nothing to the credit side of the account, even perhaps a
balance in their favor? Is it nothing, in an age when authority is
weakening and restraints are loosening, that the youth of a nation
passes through a school in which order, obedience, and reverence are
learned, where the body is systematically developed, where ideals of
self-surrender, of courage, of manhood, are inculcated, necessarily,
because fundamental conditions of military success? Is it nothing that
masses of youths out of the fields and the streets are brought
together, mingled with others of higher intellectual antecedents,
taught to work and to act together, mind in contact with mind, and
carrying back into civil life that respect for constituted authority
which is urgently needed in these days when lawlessness is erected
into a religion? It is a suggestive lesson to watch the expression and
movements of a number of rustic conscripts undergoing their first
drills, and to contrast them with the finished result as seen in the
faces and bearing of the soldiers that throng the streets. A military
training is not the worst preparation for an active life, any more
than the years spent at college are time lost, as another school of
utilitarians insists. Is it nothing that wars are less frequent, peace
better secured, by the mutual respect of nations for each other's
strength; and that, when a convulsion does come, it passes rapidly,
leaving the ordinary course of events to resume sooner, and therefore
more easily? War now not only occurs more rarely, but has rather the
character of an occasional excess, from which recovery is easy. A
century or more ago it was a chronic disease. And withal, the military
spirit, the preparedness--not merely the willingness, which is a
different thing--to fight in a good cause, which is a distinct good,
is more widely diffused and more thoroughly possessed than ever it was
when the soldier was merely the paid man. It is the nations now that
are in arms, and not simply the servants of the king.
In forecasting the future, then, it is upon these particular signs of
the times that I dwell: the arrest of the forward impulse towards
political colonization which coincided with the decade immediately
preceding the French Revolution; the absorption of the European
nations, for the following quarter of a century, with the universal
wars, involving questions chiefly political and European; the
beginning of the great era of coal and iron, of mechanical and
industrial development, which succeeded the peace, and during which it
was not aggressive colonization, but the development of colonies
already held and of new commercial centres, notably in China and
Japan, that was the most prominent feature; finally, we have, resumed
at the end of the century, the forward movement of political
colonization by the mother countries, powerfully incited thereto,
doubtless, by the citizens of the old colonies in different parts of
the world. The restlessness of Australia and the Cape Colony has
doubtless counted for much in British advances in those regions.
Contemporary with all these movements, from the first to the last, has
been the development of great standing armies, or rather of armed
nations, in Europe; and, lastly, the stirring of the East, its
entrance into the field of Western interests, not merely as a passive
something to be impinged upon, but with a vitality of its own,
formless yet, but significant, inasmuch as where before there was
torpor, if not death, now there is indisputable movement and life.
Never again, probably, can there of it be said,
"It heard the legions thunder past,
Then plunged in thought again."
Of this the astonishing development of Japan is the most obvious
evidence; but in India, though there be no probability of the old
mutinies reviving, there are signs enough of the awaking of political
intelligence, restlessness under foreign subjection, however
beneficent, desire for greater play for its own individualities; a
movement which, because intellectual and appreciative of the
advantages of Western material and political civilization, is less
immediately threatening than the former revolt, but much more ominous
of great future changes.
Of China we know less; but many observers testify to the immense
latent force of the Chinese character. It has shown itself hitherto
chiefly in the strength with which it has adhered to stereotyped
tradition. But stereotyped traditions have been overthrown already
more than once even in this unprogressive people, whose conservatism,
due largely to ignorance of better conditions existing in other lands,
is closely allied also to the unusual staying powers of the race, to
the persistence of purpose, the endurance, and the vitality
characteristic of its units. To ambition for individual material
improvement they are not insensible. The collapse of the Chinese
organization in all its branches during the late war with Japan,
though greater than was expected, was not unforeseen. It has not
altered the fact that the raw material so miserably utilized is, in
point of strength, of the best; that it is abundant, racially
homogeneous, and is multiplying rapidly. Nor, with the recent
resuscitation of the Turkish army before men's eyes, can it be thought
unlikely that the Chinese may yet obtain the organization by which
alone potential force receives adequate military development, the most
easily conferred because the simplest in conception. The Japanese have
shown great capacity, but they met little resistance; and it is easier
by far to move and to control an island kingdom of forty millions than
a vast continental territory containing near tenfold that number of
inhabitants. Comparative slowness of evolution may be predicated, but
that which for so long has kept China one, amid many diversities, may
be counted upon in the future to insure a substantial unity of impulse
which, combined with its mass, will give tremendous import to any
movement common to the whole.
To assert that a few selected characteristics, such as the above,
summarize the entire tendency of a century of teeming human life, and
stand alone among the signs that are chiefly to be considered in
looking to the future, would be to take an untenable position. It may
be said safely, however, that these factors, because the future to
which they point is more remote, are less regarded than others which
are less important; and further, that those among them which mark our
own day are also the factors whose very existence is specially
resented, criticised, and condemned by that school of political
thought which assumes for itself the title of economical, which
attained its maturity, and still lives, amid the ideas of that stage
of industrial progress coincident with the middle of the century, and
which sees all things from the point of view of production and of
internal development. Powerfully exerted throughout the world, nowhere
is the influence of this school so unchecked and so injurious as in
the United States, because, having no near neighbors to compete with
us in point of power, military necessities have been to us not
imminent, so that, like all distant dangers, they have received little
regard; and also because, with our great resources only partially
developed, the instinct to external activities has remained dormant.
At the same period and from the same causes that the European world
turned its eyes inward from the seaboard, instead of outward, the
people of the United States were similarly diverted from the external
activities in which at the beginning of the century they had their
wealth. This tendency, emphasized on the political side by the civil
war, was reinforced and has been prolonged by well-known natural
conditions. A territory much larger, far less redeemed from its
original wildness, and with perhaps even ampler proportionate
resources than the continent of Europe, contained a much smaller
number of inhabitants. Hence, despite an immense immigration, we have
lagged far behind in the work of completing our internal development,
and for that reason have not yet felt the outward impulse that now
markedly characterizes the European peoples. That we stand far apart
from the general movement of our race calls of itself for
consideration.
For the reasons mentioned it has been an easy but a short-sighted
policy, wherever it has been found among statesmen or among
journalists, to fasten attention purely on internal and economical
questions, and to reject, if not to resent, propositions looking
towards the organization and maintenance of military force, or
contemplating the extension of our national influence beyond our own
borders, on the plea that we have enough to do at home,--forgetful
that no nation, as no man, can live to itself or die to itself. It is
a policy in which we are behind our predecessors of two generations
ago, men who had not felt the deadening influence of merely economical
ideas, because they reached manhood before these attained the
preponderance they achieved under politicians of the Manchester
school; a preponderance which they still retain because the youths of
that time, who grew up under them, have not yet quite passed off the
stage. It is the lot of each generation, salutary no doubt, to be
ruled by men whose ideas are essentially those of a former day.
Breaches of continuity in national action are thus moderated or
avoided; but, on the other hand, the tendency of such a condition is
to blind men to the spirit of the existing generation, because its
rulers have the tone of their own past, and direct affairs in
accordance with it. On the very day of this writing there appears in
an American journal a slashing contrast between the action of Lord
Salisbury in the Cretan business and the spirited letter of Mr.
Gladstone upon the failure of the Concert. As a matter of fact,
however, both those British statesmen, while belonging to parties
traditionally opposed, are imbued above all with the ideas of the
middle of the century, and, governed by them, consider the disturbance
of quiet the greatest of all evils. It is difficult to believe that if
Mr. Gladstone were now in his prime, and in power, any object would
possess in his eyes an importance at all comparable to that of keeping
the peace. He would feel for the Greeks, doubtless, as Lord Salisbury
doubtless does; but he would maintain the Concert as long as he
believed that alone would avoid war. When men in sympathy with the
ideas now arising among Englishmen come on the stage, we shall see a
change--not before.
The same spirit has dominated in our own country ever since the civil
war--a far more real "revolution" in its consequences than the
struggle of the thirteen colonies against Great Britain, which in our
national speech has received the name--forced our people, both North
and South, to withdraw their eyes from external problems, and to
concentrate heart and mind with passionate fervor upon an internal
strife, in which one party was animated by the inspiring hope of
independence, while before the other was exalted the noble ideal of
union. That war, however, was directed, on the civil side, by men who
belonged to a generation even then passing away. The influence of
their own youth reverted with the return of peace, and was to be seen
in the ejection--by threat of force--of the third Napoleon from
Mexico, in the acquisition of Alaska, and in the negotiations for the
purchase of the Danish islands and of Samana Bay. Whatever may have
been the wisdom of these latter attempts,--and the writer, while
sympathizing with the spirit that suggested them, questions it from a
military, or rather naval, stand-point,--they are particularly
interesting as indicating the survival in elderly men of the
traditions accepted in their youth, but foreign to the generation then
rapidly coming into power, which rejected and frustrated them.
The latter in turn is now disappearing, and its successors, coming and
to come, are crowding into its places. Is there any indication of the
ideas these bring with them, in their own utterances, or in the spirit
of the world at large, which they must needs reflect; or, more
important perhaps still, is there any indication in the conditions of
the outside world itself which they should heed, and the influence of
which they should admit, in modifying and shaping their policies,
before these have become hardened into fixed lines, directive for many
years of the future welfare of their people?
To all these questions the writer, as one of the departing generation,
would answer yes; but it is to the last that his attention, possibly
by constitutional bias, is more naturally directed. It appears to him
that in the ebb and flow of human affairs, under those mysterious
impulses the origin of which is sought by some in a personal
Providence, by some in laws not yet fully understood, we stand at the
opening of a period when the question is to be settled decisively,
though the issue may be long delayed, whether Eastern or Western
civilization is to dominate throughout the earth and to control its
future. The great task now before the world of civilized Christianity,
its great mission, which it must fulfil or perish, is to receive into
its own bosom and raise to its own ideals those ancient and different
civilizations by which it is surrounded and outnumbered,--the
civilizations at the head of which stand China, India, and Japan.
This, to cite the most striking of the many forms in which it is
presented to us, is surely the mission which Great Britain, sword ever
at hand, has been discharging towards India; but that stands not
alone. The history of the present century has been that of a constant
increasing pressure of our own civilization upon these older ones,
till now, as we cast our eyes in any direction, there is everywhere a
stirring, a rousing from sleep, drowsy for the most part, but real,
unorganized as yet, but conscious that that which rudely interrupts
their dream of centuries possesses over them at least two
advantages,--power and material prosperity,--the things which
unspiritual humanity, the world over, most craves.
What the ultimate result will be it would be vain to prophesy,--the
data for a guess even are not at hand; but it is not equally
impossible to note present conditions, and to suggest present
considerations, which may shape proximate action, and tend to favor
the preponderance of that form of civilization which we cannot but
deem the most promising for the future, not of our race only, but of
the world at large. We are not living in a perfect world, and we may
not expect to deal with imperfect conditions by methods ideally
perfect. Time and staying power must be secured for ourselves by that
rude and imperfect, but not ignoble, arbiter, force,--force potential
and force organized,--which so far has won, and still secures, the
greatest triumphs of good in the checkered history of mankind. Our
material advantages, once noted, will be recognized readily and
appropriated with avidity; while the spiritual ideas which dominate
our thoughts, and are weighty in their influence over action, even
with those among us who do not accept historic Christianity or the
ordinary creeds of Christendom, will be rejected for long. The eternal
law, first that which is natural, afterwards that which is spiritual,
will obtain here, as in the individual, and in the long history of our
own civilization. Between the two there is an interval, in which force
must be ready to redress any threatened disturbance of an equal
balance between those who stand on divergent planes of thought,
without common standards.
And yet more is this true if, as is commonly said, faith is failing
among ourselves, if the progress of our own civilization is towards
the loss of those spiritual convictions upon which it was founded, and
which in early days were mighty indeed towards the overthrowing of
strongholds of evil. What, in such a case, shall play the tremendous
part which the Church of the Middle Ages, with all its defects and
with all the shortcomings of its ministers, played amid the ruin of
the Roman Empire and the flood of the barbarians? If our own
civilization is becoming material only, a thing limited in hope and
love to this world, I know not what we have to offer to save ourselves
or others; but in either event, whether to go down finally under a
flood of outside invasion, or whether to succeed, by our own living
faith, in converting to our ideal civilization those who shall thus
press upon us,--in either event we need time, and time can be gained
only by organized material force.
Nor is this view advanced in any spirit of unfriendliness to the other
ancient civilizations, whose genius admittedly has been and is foreign
to our own. One who believes that God has made of one blood all
nations of men who dwell on the face of the whole earth cannot but
check and repress, if he ever feels, any movement of aversion to
mankind outside his own race. But it is not necessary to hate Carthage
in order to admit that it was well for mankind that Rome triumphed;
and we at this day, and men to all time, may be thankful that a few
decades after the Punic Wars the genius of Cæsar so expanded the
bounds of the dominions of Rome, so extended, settled, and solidified
the outworks of her civilization and polity, that when the fated day
came that her power in turn should reel under the shock of conquest,
with which she had remodelled the world, and she should go down
herself, the time of the final fall was protracted for centuries by
these exterior defences. They who began the assault as barbarians
entered upon the imperial heritage no longer aliens and foreigners,
but impregnated already with the best of Roman ideas, converts to
Roman law and to Christian faith.
"When the course of history," says Mommsen, "turns from the miserable
monotony of the political selfishness which fought its battles in the
Senate House and in the streets of Rome, we may be allowed--on the
threshold of an event the effects of which still at the present day
influence the destinies of the world--to look round us for a moment,
and to indicate the point of view under which the conquest of what is
now France by the Romans, and their first contact with the inhabitants
of Germany and of Great Britain, are to be regarded in connection with
the general history of the world.... The fact that the great Celtic
people were ruined by the transalpine wars of Cæsar was not the most
important result of that grand enterprise,--far more momentous than
the negative was the positive result. It hardly admits of a doubt that
if the rule of the Senate had prolonged its semblance of life for some
generations longer, the migration of the peoples, as it is called,
would have occurred four hundred years sooner than it did, and would
have occurred at a time when the Italian civilization had not become
naturalized either in Gaul or on the Danube or in Africa and Spain.
Inasmuch as Cæsar with sure glance perceived in the German tribes the
rival antagonists of the Romano-Greek world, inasmuch as with firm
hand he established the new system of aggressive defence down even to
its details, and taught men to protect the frontiers of the empire by
rivers or artificial ramparts, to colonize the nearest barbarian
tribes along the frontier with the view of warding off the more
remote, and to recruit the Roman army by enlistment from the enemy's
country, he gained for the Hellenic-Italian culture the interval
necessary to civilize the West, just as it had already civilized the
East.... Centuries elapsed before men understood that Alexander had
not merely erected an ephemeral kingdom in the East, but had carried
Hellenism to Asia; centuries again elapsed before men understood that
Cæsar had not merely conquered a new province for the Romans, but had
laid the foundation for the Romanizing of the regions of the West. It
was only a late posterity that perceived the meaning of those
expeditions to England and Germany, so inconsiderate in a military
point of view, and so barren of immediate result.... That there is a
bridge connecting the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder
fabric of modern history; that western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic
Europe classic; that the names of Themistocles and Scipio have to us a
very different sound from those of Asoka and Salmanassar; that Homer
and Sophocles are not merely like the Vedas and Kalidasa, attractive
to the literary botanist, but bloom for us in our own garden,--all
this is the work of Cæsar."
History at times reveals her foresight concrete in the action of a
great individuality like Cæsar's. More often her profounder movements
proceed from impulses whose origin and motives cannot be traced,
although a succession of steps may be discerned and their results
stated. A few names, for instance, emerge amid the obscure movements
of the peoples which precipitated the outer peoples upon the Roman
Empire, but, with rare exceptions, they are simply exponents, pushed
forward and upward by the torrent; at the utmost guides, not
controllers, of those whom they represent but do not govern. It is
much the same now. The peoples of European civilization, after a
period of comparative repose, are again advancing all along the line,
to occupy not only the desert places of the earth, but the debatable
grounds, the buffer territories, which hitherto have separated them
from those ancient nations, with whom they now soon must stand face to
face and border to border. But who will say that this vast general
movement represents the thought, even the unconscious thought, of any
one man, as Cæsar, or of any few men? To whatever cause we may assign
it, whether to the simple conception of a personal Divine Monarchy
that shapes our ends, or to more complicated ultimate causes, the
responsibility rests upon the shoulders of no individual men.
Necessity is laid upon the peoples, and they move, like the lemmings
of Scandinavia; but to man, being not without understanding like the
beasts that perish, it is permitted to ask, "Whither?" and "What shall
be the end hereof?" Does this tend to universal peace, general
disarmament, and treaties of permanent arbitration? Is it the
harbinger of ready mutual understanding, of quick acceptance of, and
delight in, opposing traditions and habits of life and thought? Is
such quick acceptance found now where Easterns and Westerns impinge?
Does contact forebode the speedy disappearance of great armies and
navies, and dictate the wisdom of dispensing with that form of
organized force which at present is embodied in them?
What, then, will be the actual conditions when these civilizations, of
diverse origin and radically distinct,--because the evolution of
racial characteristics radically different,--confront each other
without the interposition of any neutral belt, by the intervention of
which the contrasts, being more remote, are less apparent, and within
which distinctions shade one into the other?
There will be seen, on the one hand, a vast preponderance of numbers,
and those numbers, however incoherent now in mass, composed of units
which in their individual capacity have in no small degree the great
elements of strength whereby man prevails over man and the fittest
survives. Deficient, apparently, in aptitude for political and social
organization, they have failed to evolve the aggregate power and
intellectual scope of which as communities they are otherwise capable.
This lesson too they may learn, as they already have learned from us
much that they have failed themselves to originate; but to the lack of
it is chiefly due the inferiority of material development under which,
as compared to ourselves, they now labor. But men do not covet less
the prosperity which they themselves cannot or do not create,--a trait
wherein lies the strength of communism as an aggressive social force.
Communities which want and cannot have, except by force, will take by
force, unless they are restrained by force; nor will it be
unprecedented in the history of the world that the flood of numbers
should pour over and sweep away the barriers which intelligent
foresight, like Cæsar's, may have erected against them. Still more
will this be so if the barriers have ceased to be manned--forsaken or
neglected by men in whom the proud combative spirit of their ancestors
has given way to the cry for the abandonment of military preparation
and to the decay of warlike habits.
Nevertheless, even under such conditions,--which obtained increasingly
during the decline of the Roman Empire,--positions suitably chosen,
frontiers suitably advanced, will do much to retard and, by gaining
time, to modify the disaster to the one party, and to convert the
general issue to the benefit of the world. Hence the immense
importance of discerning betimes what the real value of positions is,
and where occupation should betimes begin. Here, in part at least, is
the significance of the great outward movement of the European nations
to-day. Consciously or unconsciously, they are advancing the outposts
of our civilization, and accumulating the line of defences which will
permit it to survive, or at the least will insure that it shall not go
down till it has leavened the character of the world for a future
brighter even than its past, just as the Roman civilization inspired
and exalted its Teutonic conquerors, and continues to bless them to
this day.
Such is the tendency of movement in that which we in common parlance
call the Old World. As the nineteenth century closes, the tide has
already turned and the current is flowing strongly. It is not too
soon, for vast is the work before it. Contrasted to the outside world
in extent and population, the civilization of the European group of
families, to which our interests and anxieties, our hopes and fears,
are so largely confined, has been as an oasis in a desert. The seat
and scene of the loftiest culture, of the highest intellectual
activities, it is not in them so much that it has exceeded the rest of
the world as in the political development and material prosperity
which it has owed to the virile energies of its sons, alike in
commerce and in war. To these energies the mechanical and scientific
acquirements of the past half-century or more have extended means
whereby prosperity has increased manifold, as have the inequalities in
material well-being existing between those within its borders and
those without, who have not had the opportunity or the wit to use the
same advantages. And along with this preeminence in wealth arises the
cry to disarm, as though the race, not of Europe only, but of the
world, were already run, and the goal of universal peace not only
reached but secured. Yet are conditions such, even within our favored
borders, that we are ready to disband the particular organized
manifestation of physical force which we call the police?
Despite internal jealousies and friction on the continent of Europe,
perhaps even because of them, the solidarity of the European family
therein contained is shown in this great common movement, the ultimate
beneficence of which is beyond all doubt, as evidenced by the British
domination in India and Egypt, and to which the habit of arms not only
contributes, but is essential. India and Egypt are at present the two
most conspicuous, though they are not the sole, illustrations of
benefits innumerable and lasting, which rest upon the power of the
sword in the hands of enlightenment and justice. It is possible, of
course, to confuse this conclusion, to obscure the real issue, by
dwelling upon details of wrongs at times inflicted, of blunders often
made. Any episode in the struggling progress of humanity may be thus
perplexed; but looking at the broad result, it is indisputable that
the vast gains to humanity made in the regions named not only once
originated, but still rest, upon the exertion and continued
maintenance of organized physical force.
The same general solidarity as against the outside world, which is
unconsciously manifested in the general resumption of colonizing
movements, receives particular conscious expression in the idea of
imperial federation, which, amid the many buffets and reverses common
to all successful movements, has gained such notable ground in the
sentiment of the British people and of their colonists. That immense
practical difficulties have to be overcome, in order to realize the
ends towards which such sentiments point, is but a commonplace of
human experience in all ages and countries. They give rise to the
ready sneer of impossible, just as any project of extending the sphere
of the United States, by annexation or otherwise, is met by the
constitutional lion in the path, which the unwilling or the
apprehensive is ever sure to find; yet, to use words of one who never
lightly admitted impossibilities, "If a thing is necessary to be done,
the more difficulties, the more necessary to try to remove them." As
sentiment strengthens, it undermines obstacles, and they crumble
before it.
The same tendency is shown in the undeniable disposition of the
British people and of British, statesmen to cultivate the good-will of
the United States, and to draw closer the relations between the two
countries. For the disposition underlying such a tendency Mr. Balfour
has used an expression, "race patriotism,"--a phrase which finds its
first approximation, doubtless, in the English-speaking family, but
which may well extend its embrace, in a time yet distant, to all those
who have drawn their present civilization from the same remote
sources. The phrase is so pregnant of solution for the problems of the
future, as conceived by the writer, that he hopes to see it obtain the
currency due to the value of the idea which it formulates. That this
disposition on the part of Great Britain, towards her colonies and
towards the United States, shows sound policy as well as sentiment,
may be granted readily; but why should sound policy, the seeking of
one's own advantage, if by open and honest means, be imputed as a
crime? In democracies, however, policy cannot long dispute the sceptre
with sentiment. That there is lukewarm response in the United States
is due to that narrow conception which grew up with the middle of the
century, whose analogue in Great Britain is the Little England party,
and which in our own country would turn all eyes inward, and see no
duty save to ourselves. How shall two walk together except they be
agreed? How shall there be true sympathy between a nation whose
political activities are world-wide, and one that eats out its heart
in merely internal political strife? When we begin really to look
abroad, and to busy ourselves with our duties to the world at large in
our generation--and not before--we shall stretch out our hands to
Great Britain, realizing that in unity of heart among the
English-speaking races lies the best hope of humanity in the doubtful
days ahead.
In the determination of the duties of nations, nearness is the most
conspicuous and the most general indication. Considering the American
states as members of the European family, as they are by traditions,
institutions, and languages, it is in the Pacific, where the westward
course of empire again meets the East, that their relations to the
future of the world become most apparent. The Atlantic, bordered on
either shore by the European family in the strongest and most advanced
types of its political development, no longer severs, but binds
together, by all the facilities and abundance of water communications,
the once divided children of the same mother; the inheritors of Greece
and Rome, and of the Teutonic conquerors of the latter. A limited
express or a flying freight may carry a few passengers or a small bulk
overland from the Atlantic to the Pacific more rapidly than modern
steamers can cross the former ocean, but for the vast amounts in
numbers or in quantity which are required for the full fruition of
communication, it is the land that divides, and not the sea. On the
Pacific coast, severed from their brethren by desert and mountain
range, are found the outposts, the exposed pioneers of European
civilization, whom it is one of the first duties of the European
family to bind more closely to the main body, and to protect, by due
foresight over the approaches to them on either side.
It is in this political fact, and not in the weighing of merely
commercial advantages, that is to be found the great significance of
the future canal across the Central American isthmus, as well as the
importance of the Caribbean Sea; for the latter is inseparably
intwined with all international consideration of the isthmus problem.
Wherever situated, whether at Panama or at Nicaragua, the fundamental
meaning of the canal will be that it advances by thousands of miles
the frontiers of European civilization in general, and of the United
States in particular; that it knits together the whole system of
American states enjoying that civilization as in no other way they can
be bound. In the Caribbean Archipelago--the very domain of sea power,
if ever region could be called so--are the natural home and centre of
those influences by which such a maritime highway as a canal must be
controlled, even as the control of the Suez Canal rests in the
Mediterranean. Hawaii, too, is an outpost of the canal, as surely as
Aden or Malta is of Suez; or as Malta was of India in the days long
before the canal, when Nelson proclaimed that in that point of view
chiefly was it important to Great Britain. In the cluster of island
fortresses of the Caribbean is one of the greatest of the nerve
centres of the whole body of European civilization; and it is to be
regretted that so serious a portion of them now is in hands which not
only never have given, but to all appearances never can give, the
development which is required by the general interest.
For what awaits us in the future, in common with the states of Europe,
is not a mere question of advantage or disadvantage--of more or less.
Issues of vital moment are involved. A present generation is trustee
for its successors, and may be faithless to its charge quite as truly
by inaction as by action, by omission as by commission. Failure to
improve opportunity, where just occasion arises, may entail upon
posterity problems and difficulties which, if overcome at all--it may
then be too late--will be so at the cost of blood and tears that
timely foresight might have spared. Such preventive measures, if
taken, are in no true sense offensive but defensive. Decadent
conditions, such as we observe in Turkey--and not in Turkey
alone--cannot be indefinitely prolonged by opportunist counsels or
timid procrastination. A time comes in human affairs, as in physical
ailments, when heroic measures must be used to save the life of a
patient or the welfare of a community; and if that time is allowed to
pass, as many now think that it was at the time of the Crimean war,
the last state is worse than the first,--an opinion which these
passing days of the hesitancy of the Concert and the anguish of
Greece, not to speak of the Armenian outrages, surely indorse. Europe,
advancing in distant regions, still allows to exist in her own side,
unexcised, a sore that may yet drain her life-blood; still leaves in
recognized dominion, over fair regions of great future import, a
system whose hopelessness of political and social improvement the
lapse of time renders continually more certain,--an evil augury for
the future, if a turning tide shall find it unchanged, an outpost of
barbarism ready for alien occupation.
It is essential to our own good, it is yet more essential as part of
our duty to the commonwealth of peoples to which we racially belong,
that we look with clear, dispassionate, but resolute eyes upon the
fact that civilizations on different planes of material prosperity and
progress, with different spiritual ideals, and with very different
political capacities, are fast closing together. It is a condition not
unprecedented in the history of the world. When it befell a great
united empire, enervated by long years of unwarlike habits among its
chief citizens, it entailed ruin, but ruin deferred through centuries,
thanks to the provision made beforehand by a great general and
statesman. The Saracenic and Turkish invasions, on the contrary, after
generations of advance, were first checked, and then rolled back; for
they fell upon peoples, disunited indeed by internal discords and
strife, like the nations of Europe to-day, but still nations of
warriors, ready by training and habit to strike for their rights, and,
if need were, to die for them. In the providence of God, along with
the immense increase of prosperity, of physical and mental luxury,
brought by this century, there has grown up also that counterpoise
stigmatized as "militarism," which has converted Europe into a great
camp of soldiers prepared for war. The ill-timed cry for disarmament,
heedless of the menacing possibilities of the future, breaks idly
against a great fact, which finds its sufficient justification in
present conditions, but which is, above all, an unconscious
preparation for something as yet noted but by few.
On the side of the land, these great armies, and the blind outward
impulse of the European peoples, are the assurance that generations
must elapse ere the barriers can be overcome behind which rests the
citadel of Christian civilization. On the side of the sea there is no
state charged with weightier responsibilities than the United States.
In the Caribbean, the sensitive resentment by our people of any
supposed fresh encroachment by another state of the European family
has been manifested too plainly and too recently to admit of dispute.
Such an attitude of itself demands of us to be ready to support it by
organized force, exactly as the mutual jealousy of states within the
European Continent imposes upon them the maintenance of their great
armies--destined, we believe, in the future, to fulfil a nobler
mission. Where we thus exclude others, we accept for ourselves the
responsibility for that which is due to the general family of our
civilization; and the Caribbean Sea, with its isthmus, is the nexus
where will meet the chords binding the East to the West, the Atlantic
to the Pacific.
The Isthmus, with all that depends upon it,--its canal and its
approaches on either hand,--will link the eastern side of the American
continent to the western as no network of land communications ever
can. In it the United States has asserted a special interest. In the
present she can maintain her claim, and in the future perform her
duty, only by the creation of that sea power upon which predominance
in the Caribbean must ever depend. In short, as the internal
jealousies of Europe, and the purely democratic institution of the
_levée en masse_--the general enforcement of military training--have
prepared the way for great national armies, whose mission seems yet
obscure, so the gradual broadening and tightening hold upon the
sentiment of American democracy of that conviction loosely
characterized as the Monroe doctrine finds its logical and inevitable
outcome in a great sea power, the correlative, in connection with that
of Great Britain, of those armies which continue to flourish under the
most popular institutions, despite the wails of economists and the
lamentations of those who wish peace without paying the one price
which alone has ever insured peace,--readiness for war.
Thus it was, while readiness for war lasted, that the Teuton was held
back until he became civilized, humanized, after the standard of that
age; till the root of the matter was in him, sure to bear fruit in due
season. He was held back by organized armed force--by armies. Will it
be said that that was in a past barbaric age? Barbarism, however, is
not in more or less material prosperity, or even political
development, but in the inner man, in the spiritual ideal; and the
material, which comes first and has in itself no salt of life to save
from corruption, must be controlled by other material forces, until
the spiritual can find room and time to germinate. We need not fear
but that that which appeals to the senses in our civilization will be
appropriated, even though it be necessary to destroy us, if disarmed,
in order to obtain it. Our own civilization less its spiritual element
is barbarism; and barbarism will be the civilization of those who
assimilate its material progress without imbibing the indwelling
spirit.
Let us worship peace, indeed, as the goal at which humanity must hope
to arrive; but let us not fancy that peace is to be had as a boy
wrenches an unripe fruit from a tree. Nor will peace be reached by
ignoring the conditions that confront us, or by exaggerating the
charms of quiet, of prosperity, of ease, and by contrasting these
exclusively with the alarms and horrors of war. Merely utilitarian
arguments have never convinced nor converted mankind, and they never
will; for mankind knows that there is something better. Its homage
will never be commanded by peace, presented as the tutelary deity of
the stock-market.
Nothing is more ominous for the future of our race than that tendency,
vociferous at present, which refuses to recognize in the profession of
arms, in war, that something which inspired Wordsworth's "Happy
Warrior," which soothed the dying hours of Henry Lawrence, who framed
the ideals of his career on the poet's conception, and so nobly
illustrated it in his self-sacrifice; that something which has made
the soldier to all ages the type of heroism and of self-denial. When
the religion of Christ, of Him who was led as a lamb to the slaughter,
seeks to raise before its followers the image of self-control, and of
resistance to evil, it is the soldier whom it presents. He Himself, if
by office King of Peace, is, first of all, in the essence of His
Being, King of Righteousness, without which true peace cannot be.
Conflict is the condition of all life, material and spiritual; and it
is to the soldier's experience that the spiritual life goes for its
most vivid metaphors and its loftiest inspirations. Whatever else the
twentieth century may bring us, it will not, from anything now current
in the thought of the nineteenth, receive a nobler ideal.
[Illustration: THE GULF OF MEXICO AND THE CARIBBEAN SEA]